The Dough is Rising
My grandmother recently mailed me a ziplock of yeast and a French bread recipe (along with a candy thermometer, xanthum gum in another ziplock, and a few other small goodies).
The only thing is, I’m not the best baker. I like to think I can follow directions well, but even that takes practice when it comes to doing things at the right time in the right order. And just as baking changes at high altitudes, so does becoming acquainted with the Cloud when you’re used to shared hosting.
…So the point is I accidentally installed a WordPress cluster on Reclaim Cloud. Basically this is a WordPress built for a site many (many) times the size of this meager blog. I searched “WordPress” in the Marketplace and that was the first result to catch my eye, so I installed it without really thinking. When it came with all the additional storage and other things, I assumed it was another aspect I had to get a better grasp of within the Cloud. I had the recipe for the bread and the ingredients (including yeast, which I had never used before — except maybe as a kid in school putting water on a tiny pile of the stuff and watching it bubble. That’s what happens, right?).
During an internal Reclaim meeting discussing the Cloud and any questions we may have about supporting it, I asked a question involving the instance I had installed (something about DNS), and Tim kindly let me know that I definitely didn’t need the setup I installed.
What I ultimately found out was that while a WordPress standalone can be installed on the Cloud, it isn’t always efficient financially to do so. So why are we replacing shared hosting with the Cloud? Is the Cloud supposed to be capitalized? Is homemade french bread a boatload of carbs in a delicious textured package? I can answer two of those.
Cloud hosting isn’t a replacement for shared hosting, just an alternative that depends on your needs.
• Shared Hosting is stagnant, consistent, rigid. LAMP, WordPress, HTML.
• Cloud hosting is scalable, resource-based, higher level of performance. MongoDB, NodeJS, performant PHP applications (AKA ton a traffic and need to scale seamlessly).
If you’re like me and have a few sites that rarely get any traffic, paying a fixed price/year ends up being way better than paying based on usage.
But, say, if you run a large WordPress Multisite that gets waves of users signing up (when entire classes are signing up at once, for instance). You won’t want to constantly pay for the high ceiling of resources for those busy times when most other times many of those resources aren’t being used.
There are some people who may find it best to use both the cloud and shared hosting for different projects.
I am still trying to get used to the cloud and its new-to-me-ness. Heck, I’m still trying to learn how to support shared hosting every day. Sometimes as much as I’d like to understand things right away, I know I just need to step away and let the dough rise slowly. Before I know it, I’ll be that much closer to a beautiful loaf fresh from the oven.
Okay I didn’t quite know how to end that last sentence but I’m sure the point is still understood. I really want bread right now.
Signed,
Gluten’s #1 fan
